Some humans may be willing to travel far for fine dining, but that's nothing compared to a sooty shearwater: these birds, which are based in New Zealand, fly roughly 40,000 miles each year to reach their seasonal feeding grounds along coastal California, Alaska, and Japan--and some even clock 620 miles in a single day.

Though it looks chaotic at first glance, this migration map, which shows the electronic tracks of 19 shearwaters created by UC Santa Cruz biologist Scott Shaffer in 2005, color-codes the various legs of their trek: light-blue lines track the birds during breeding season, yellow lines represent the northward journey, and orange lines show the winter feeding grounds and southward return. And if you look closer, as the bottom panels reveal, the journeys to the three breeding grounds have one major thing in common: they form figure-eight patterns on a global scale. Unfortunately, as monitoring efforts continue, we may see these pretty patterns cut short: warming temperatures could deplete phytoplankton populations, which means less fish, squid, and krill for the birds to feast on, and could affect whether sooty shearwaters have enough energy to make it back to their New Zealand breeding grounds.